A
lot of people have some pretty bad things to say about CokeTunes, and they're pretty justfied.
In todays age of web development, it seems insane to make technology decisions which will instantly alienate 10-15% of your potential market share. The site requring Internet Explorer 6.0 and above (although there are rumors that the IE7 beta won't load the site) is just plain stupid - yeah sure the flash menus look ok, but if you can't manage to do that in a way which is compatiable with more browsers then you really need to consider a career change.
What's worse is that they've made bad technology and architecture decisions, and then they've even managed to implement those decisions badly as well. Offering WMA only is stupid enough, but zipping the WMA files *** before download is stupider still. Everyone knows that compressing data which is already compressed can only increase the size. The menus on the front page also look a bit cheap, if you hover over the top level menu then you can see the formula used to construct the location which you're sent to via JavaScript - it's not a big deal, but is it *really* that hard to put some small piece of text in the status bar when the thing is hovered over to avoid showing that crap to the user? (that's rhetorical btw, it's not that hard, really)
They display a small disclaimer warning iPod users on the initial page, but it's only once you actually go inside the store (which pops up in a new browser window - I really *hate* sites that do that, not that it would matter if I was able to use Firefox of course) where you get to learn more about this, by following a link titled "iPod users click here". The link basically says "you're screwed" and then goes on to list a number of "CokeTunes compatiable players". I like how it's my iPod which is incompatiable with CokeTunes, and not the other way around!
Finally, I think their choice of genres is a bit lame. But that might just be me.
Good luck CokeTunes, you're going to need it.
*** Some people have made comments asking why the hell they zipped the files. I'm fairly sure they're compressing them so that IE will let the user download the file, instead of offering to instantly play it - because if the latter happened, then the file would be lost inside the IE cache, and the user would "lose" it as soon as they closed Media player. I figure they just wanted to avoid the hassle of users complaining that the site "lost" their downloads or something like that. There's bound to be a better way around this problem, the one CokeTunes has gone for is one hell of a kludge.